Looking Back at DRAG ME TO HELL: Fun With Horror Conventions

The Evil Dead – it is probably impossible to begin the following review with any other words, and Sam Raimi will forever remain marked by the stigma of his first projects, no matter how many Spider-Men-type of movies he still goes on to make. This Orson Welles of horror cinema has developed excellent directorial techniques in order to scare and amuse the viewer in equal measure. Drag Me to Hell.

It will remain a matter of debate how much of this is due to the director himself and how much to the brilliant performance of Bruce Campbell, who is in a way identified with Raimi’s cinema. However, this ceases to matter when we speak of the work of the father of The Evil Dead, made without the participation of the actor-symbol. Drag Me to Hell, another auteur project by the American filmmaker, operating within the horror universe, was supposed—according to posters and trailers—to be a return to classic horror, a return for which audiences had to wait a long time.

The film by Sam Raimi will probably not free itself from comparisons with the work of another master of horror. Namely, Thinner by Stephen King follows essentially the same plot line as the story of Christine, a bank employee in Drag Me to Hell. Like King’s Billy Halleck, the young woman is afflicted with an old Gypsy curse that determines her actions over the next few days.

Sylvia Ganush does not only have a black soul. The open mouth of the Gypsy witch reveals ranks of tar-colored teeth, which deserve not just a few words but an entire essay, since a whole array of comic effects is connected precisely with the dental aspect of Raimi’s film. Mrs. Ganush is the definition of every dentist’s nightmare, and thanks to the substances expelled from her maw straight onto Christine’s face, Drag Me to Hell probably deserves to be called gastro horror.

The demonic author of the entire misfortune is at the same time a tragic figure, seemingly taken from another world known from fairy tales and legends, who, thrown into the deep waters of our gray reality of banks and offices, is unable to cope. Raimi plays an interesting social note, presenting the traps of the capitalist world on the intellectual level of EC comics—by taking part in the rat race, you will end up like a rat, and in the process you will ruin someone’s life and dreams.

Christine is, after all, a provincial woman fighting for a position in a company, desperately trying to prove that she is in no way inferior to the big-city gentlemen and ladies, including in her lack of empathy and human kindness. A simple moral for a young person setting out into the world. Be that as it may, the viewer’s sympathy lies with Christine, condemned to eternal torment in hellfire.

Raimi does not spare her difficulties on the road to postponing the sentence; the sense of relentlessly passing time accompanies Christine just as intensely as it does the viewer. The breakneck pace of Drag Me to Hell does not allow even for a longer blink of an eye, yet at the same time it contributes to excessive narrative shortcuts. Well, the spectacle called Drag Me to Hell comes as a package deal, complete with its entire inventory.

That is why we allow Raimi to pull the wool over our eyes, duplicating his own gags as often as the schematic jump scenes that invariably follow suggestive, swelling musical cues. We have no objection to experiencing more horror in just any run-of-the-mill fright flick, and we stare at the screen only to check whether the whole story will end with the predictable finale we had anticipated.

We grant the creator of The Evil Dead such a large credit of trust that it does not translate into the hopes placed in his film, yet nonetheless we do not hold it against him that Sam Raimi has slightly deceived us by delivering a somewhat derivative product. After all, it is his gift to the fans, so turning up one’s nose is out of place—Drag Me to Hell is several dozen minutes of pure fun with convention, fun with us, fun with Christine, fun with old Ganush’s teeth. In other words: pure joy of creation and an equally unclouded pleasure of watching.